24 September 2012

In an effort to return to normalcy, I'm actually making menus and lists, executing shopping trips, and then chopping onions to my heart's content.

We all have those things that make us feel settled, contented, at peace. Being climbed upon by children, special passages of comforting books, pitifully picking out melodies on the piano, really good or fairly bad television, paul forster kisses, friends around the dinner table, passages from the BCP are all on my list. However, one moment, beyond others, convinces me I'm engaged in the rich goodness of day to day duty: Yellow onions, a Henkel knife, and the deliberate up and down into perfect dice.

18 September 2012

This morning, Ada Brooks had a hard time with her Latin translations. They were just a bit harder than they have been, and there were more of them than there have been, and I was out of town last Thursday-Sunday, etc.

So, by the time she got to this sentence, she wasn't feeling chipper, but, rather, in the Forster Family vernacular, she was done.

Natura pulchra est, non iuesta.

Nature is beautiful, not just.

She marched into where I was headquartered, helping Eason with his handwriting.

"I don't think I've translated this correctly. I'm having trouble with all of them, Mama. They are just especially hard today. Ugggghhhhh." (Foot stomp action as well).

"Okay - dahlin - let me take a look."

I looked, and discovered that while she has not mastered the turning of halting first-try translations into flowing prose, she had not, in fact, made many mistakes.

"No, sweetheart - you got that one right - Nature is beautiful, not just."

AB: "Well, that's not true. How is nature unjust? How can nature even be just or unjust? And even if it can be, it seems pretty just to me."